Leaving Japan, arriving somewhere unfamiliar

My wife and I moved to Salzburg on March 17th. It was her opportunity — a position she had worked toward for years — and I followed. Austria is very green. The mountains are bigger than I expected. Our apartment is small but has a nice window.

I knew nobody here. My German was not good. The city was fine to us in the way that cities are fine to strangers — not unfriendly, just not yet open. I would walk through the Altstadt and feel exactly what I had felt in that Tokyo supermarket: present, surrounded, and somehow not quite there. The irony was a little funny, honestly. I was building an app for this exact problem while living it every day.

I think it helped, in the end. The problem stopped feeling abstract. I had a specific café in mind. A specific feeling of sitting somewhere and not knowing anyone within a very large radius. I kept working on the app.